Anti-aging trick

This morning after my shower, I noticed the lighting was especially forgiving. I happened to look up at the skylight and saw that it was crisscrossed with iridescent spider webs.

I don’t plan on cleaning them away anytime soon.

Reconnecting with an old favorite

Before posting that last bit, I finished rereading an old favorite for the third time – My Antonia. Sigh – (imagining a sunset with plow silhouette and heroic movie soundtrack music (A western Tara's Theme) every time I say the name). And I’ll probably read it yet again before I die. My grandfather gave me this book when I was about the age of Antonia when Jim met her on the way to Black Hawk, Nebraska. Maybe he knew it would be an easy book for a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan to love. My name is scrawled in atrocious black marker printing on the book plate inside the front cover, even though it’s only a paperback, and a faded yellow violet has been pressed so long between the pages that it left a silhouette 2 pages back. I loved the cover, the typeface, the heft, the story, the characters, and I fell in love with Willa Cather. At a time when I had little spending money, I saved up enough to buy half a shelf of her books. O Pioneers and Death Comes for the Archbishop I’ve reread not too long ago, and I’ve pulled One of Ours to revisit since my husband’s at war. (After I finish Franny and Zooey, my upstairs book, and Summertime, my downstairs/swim lesson book).
In a way, the book has become a part of the myth of my own youth, just as it is the story of Jim’s revisiting the places and people of his past that have formed his present person. Does his attachment to his memories strengthen who he is or prevent him from falling in love with anyone else?

On the surface, there isn’t much complexity to the plot to My Antonia. And maybe it’s sentimental and nostalgic. I thought about picking it for Reading for Believers, but I was afraid others might think it dull. And I didn’t know if my love for it would stand another read. But it is moving and beautifully, though sparely, written. I’ve dogeared a lot of pages.


If Home tells the story of a good life, badly lived (by Jack), My Antonia is the story of a hard life, well lived. Despite the setbacks Antonia faces time and again, she is still full of joy when Jim meets her 20 years and 12 kids after her disgrace. She doesn’t even begrudge the years she spent working in town. Her immigrant peers from the country have made money and found gold, but none have found the happiness she possesses, not even Jim, whose love for Antonia isn’t big enough to accommodate her spirit. She never loses the “fire of life.” An achievement.


I suppose it is that unfulfilled connection between Jim and Antonia that made the book so heartwrenching to me as a young teenager addicted to romance. It’s clear that they remain in love with each other, but that love is not possessive, and from the beginning it honestly recognizes how unsuited they are for each other while also recognizing each other’s worthiness.

Could Jim and Antonia have made a life together? Jim recognizes that even Cusak, with whom Antonia has such a fruitful relationship, is not living the life he planned to live: “I wonder whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!” A challenge to the Catholic idea of marriage, but Cusak recognizes his sacrifices have merit in the enjoyment he gets from his sons. That line jumped out at me, as a military wife. I certainly never planned on living in the deep south, separated for months from my husband, but I had a moment of real happiness to be here the other day, while admiring the resurrection ferns green on the dark live oaks against the blue sky. And perhaps the question could be turned on Jim: Is he living the life that is right for him?

This time I enjoyed the book as much for its love affair with the land as the affair between Jim and Antonia. When Jim arrives in Nebraska from Virginia, he is in awe of seeing the complete dome of the sky. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, Blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.” The sunflower lined roads seem roads to freedom. Jim’s grandfather can see the plains will someday feed the world. The golden fields, the plow silhouetted by the sunset, the harsh winters, the hot summers, all fed the nostalgia for my own semi-rural Midwestern youth.

Some favorite lines:

“The prayers of all good people are good.” Jim’s grandfather comments, in a nod to the Shimerda’s Catholicism.


“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I know that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thing of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun. . . . But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences.”


Among the garden vegetables “nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun. . . I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

Recent reads

The books were sitting in a stack on my sister’s desk on top of a book of mine I was reclaiming. So I took hers along with mine. They were a couple of books that have been talked about so much I wasn’t sure I even wanted to read them, but I never like feeling left out of a conversation. So I finally got around to reading the Life of Pi and Home a couple weeks ago.

I first picked up Life of Pi by Yann Martel once at a library three moves ago and never got past the introduction. It sounded so artificially heavy: “This is a story that will make you believe in God,” the storyteller says. I’m still trying to figure out how it does that. Because Pi survives? Because he returns to civilization and lives a relatively normal life with a wife and kids after his traumatic experience at sea? Because he wants to love God as best as he can so he incorporates Christian, Muslim, and Hindu practices into his worship?


Although I sound critical, I actually enjoyed reading the book. It’s a much more interesting sea survival book than the biggest section of Robinson Crusoe, even though both provide a lot of details about their work to survive. So it made pretty good beach reading: I’m ready for a shipwreck. While my sister kept her eyes on her baby and my kids too, I sat on the beach and got some reading done in her unread book, a pastime I haven’t been able to indulge in much since I started having babies.

Having recently visited a couple of zoos, I also took pleasure in the comments about the wild animals appreciating their confinement, easy meals, and the feeling of safety – a sentiment similar to the idea expressed so well in a Right to Be Merry that true freedom often comes from limited choices (choices being something I've been struggling with lately).


But if this is a story that is to make me believe in God, why doesn’t Pi examine what his teachers share about the afterlife? Why was there no conflict in Pi’s heart about what might happen to his soul if he were to be eaten by the tiger or die of exposure/starvation/shark attack? I kept wondering if Pi would make a choice like his teachers wanted him to do, but perhaps his cobbled together faith is all about surviving the present moment in life and finding happiness in this world, which often seems as devoid of interest but full of potential beauty as the open sea.

(On the riddle at the end: I vote on the first version of the story, over the second, more plausible edition Pi tells his examiners. Why not let the symbols be real?)

Marked passages: “The agnostic fails to choose, while the atheist could make a leap of faith.”


“Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious. . . You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point when you’re at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you’re the luckiest peson on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish.”


“For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.”
  ***********************************************************************
I actually read Home by Marianne Robinson before I read Pi.  Robinson's Gilead got a lot of press when it came out, so when my mom got ahold of a copy last summer, I started it, but ended up skimming to the end because it moved so slowly. Home, likewise, moves slowly, as it unfolds the relationship between Jack, Glory, and Pastor Boughton as the pastor is dying, Jack is drying out, and Glory is recovering from a failed love affair. I wonder if both books would have functioned better as novellas.

There’s something to be said for the slow pace, revealing bits and pieces of each character’s story and personality gradually. It allowed the characters to come into their own, so the reader gets to know them as they grow in knowledge of themselves. I liked the characters and grew interested in their relationship and where they might head. The pastor faces his ambivalent feelings toward his wayward son, whom it is both “a curse and an affliction” to love, a familiar feeling, although I'm not sure I'd articulate it thus.

It wasn’t clear until the very end whether or not Jack would stick to his sobriety. He was a man to be pitied, but it was eventually clear that he also had an admirable side. He struggles with faith honestly, and believes himself damned even though he doubts Scripture. So is it this belief in damnation that compels him to commit sins greater than the prior ones? It seemed like there were a couple of points where Robinson suggests he’s manic depressive or something similar, as if to give him an excuse for his recurring failures, despite his brains and genes.
Even so, Robinson doesn’t go for the easy resolution – although redemption is there waiting for Jack. Glory does seem to come to terms with her need to accept and give help to her family, and to be thankful for the grace to be present for her nephew. I loved the emphasis on family as a vehicle of grace, but I’m pretty sure I won’t ever pick this book up to read it again.


A couple good quotes: “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them like an exile? . . . That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise , other the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”


“The Lord does work through human beings, through families. . . Part of it is giving care and another part is accepting it. That second part is difficult and very important . . . That’s what the family is for. . . Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it.”

Oil Spill Apocalypse

I’ve been spending a lot of time getting caught up on blogs since we returned earlier this week. Too much time really. I'm embarrassed to admit that the other night I stayed up past midnight, 1, 2, reading. I will never get this time back, I thought as I crashed into bed. And time was so plentiful when I was on vacation from home and the internet. (Synchronicity to read Elizabeth Foss's reflections on her mixed emotions about blogging and then evologia's similar conclusions.)

But what I really had a hard time pulling myself away from that night were articles about the possible repercussions of the BP oil spill. Being newly returned to the coast, I was eager to get updates on its status, especially the happy news that the leak is capped.  The beach here is still open. I saw a jetskier enjoying a sunny day on the water as I drove down Highway 90.  And a neighbor's son is taking sailing lessons which have only been cancelled one day.  Even the least terns are still around in their roped off "Nest in Peace" area. But there are no pelicans on the pier where we used to see sometimes a dozen or more roosting.  And every morning cleaning crews are out scouting for tarballs on the beach.

It was my brother-in-law who alerted me to some web pages (Helium being one of them. Reputable or not?) that give a rather gloomy, if not downright apocalyptic, view of some of the possible repercussions of oil and methane leaking into the ocean and preparing to split apart the ocean floor causing catastrophic, world-crushing tsunamis. Another mentioned cancer causing amounts of benzene already in the air around New Orleans. Add to this, we watched 2012 while at my in-laws last week. Full of flaws, but I’ve loved John Cusack since The Journey of Natty Gann, (one of the first things I noticed about my husband when we first started dating was that his upper lip resembles JC’s), so I enjoyed watching it, but now all that information blackout business is coming back to me. We will be told of our impending death before the tsunami hits? Will we have time to prepare?

I could very easily get drawn into conspiracy theories. But in the back of my mind, I know that death is always imminent. And I know I’m unprepared. Time to get to confession. Time to get back to a routine that includes more conversation with God and less with myself.

Travel Notes

After being home a week, I realize I’d much rather spend hours on a highway than minutes stuck in traffic. The kids have gotten used to long car trips, and I enjoy daydreaming the hours away. Maybe I should have been a trucker. I like the way it always rains when we cross the Ozarks, the distinctive change in the dirt to the red earth of Oklahoma, the way as soon as you cross into Michigan from Indiana, the air smells of pine trees. We get to see things like rain falling in a column in the distance, windmill farms eerily lit up at night, and lots of billboards for lawyers anxious to help victims of the oil spill. So if I get cancer I know whom to call.

I have also noticed that where there are a lot of casinos, there are also a lot of pawn shops.

***
Fixing the a/c in the GMC was not a cheap repair.  Just when you get the thing paid off...

But I have not replaced the broken DVD player.  Keeping the kids happy on the road became easier when we picked up a little DVD player a number of years ago. I felt like a sell-out when we got it, so I inflicted rules like equal amounts of time have to be spent in reading as spent watching movies. When I’m driving solo, I can’t entertain, so it does come in handy. But now we own a number of movies I have never seen all the way through. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is one. Great music to listen to while driving. I should make the kids read the book.

When the DVD player malfunctioned early on our last day of driving, the kids had just finished watching the mini-cd of their dad reading some books – part of a great program sponsored by the USO. They videorecord the service member reading, and then through donations, give the service member the CD and the books he read to mail to his children. Fun for all.  It seemed to hold them over for the rest of the trip - or else they were just too tired to complain.

They were also able to enjoy the fruits of reading earlier in the trip. Barnes and Noble has a reading program for kindergarten – 6th grade kids: Read 8 books, fill out a form asking for title, author, and setting, and get a free book from the list of choices for the readers grade level. Easy free books - one of the kids read the 8 books on the first leg of the trip. But of course, it’s hard to walk out of Barnes and Noble without buying something else.

***
In one southern state, we passed a building that claimed to be a “Baptist Temple” but it was made of corrugated steel. No cross, plain rectangle shape. It could have been an auto parts shop or a warehouse. I imagine the people who go to that church take an indignant stance against the human labor and money that go into building cathedrals. I’ve heard more than one rant about the waste of money on big beautiful churches, but happily there’s been a resurgence in building them, thanks in some part due to one of my husband’s former professors, Duncan Stroik, who designed my cousins' church in Kentucky. I wonder if its baldacchino mystified some members who used to worship in a little brick hall of a church. But who isn’t moved to thoughts of awe in such a place?

***
Perhaps we’ve spent too many hours on the road when my six year old says things like, “Guess what kind of house I want when I grow up?” His sister guessed “Castle? Mansion? Lake House?” All wrong. He wants: “A camper! I’m going to invent a robot driver so I can go to the bathroom whenever I want.”

***
One of my favorite parts of coming home is going through the mail that accumulated while we were out. We picked up our box yesterday. Several personal notes and birthday cards, several magazines, and lots and lots of junk. I like to get all the junk mail at once because it is easier for me to throw it away without opening and saving address stickers. But what about these people who send money in hopes of receiving more money? So I did look through some of the junk, one interesting piece being an offer for a free issue of Laphams, a new magazine focused on history and made up primarily of excerpts from original sources.  Looks interesting. But the advertisement mentioned how people a generation ago used to buy the Britannica collection of Great Books or the Harvard Classics and never read them.  Hmmm. I have both those collections, and never read them. But in college I did read a lot of the titles in paperback editions... maybe I don't need the magazine.

Home again, home again, jiggety jog

After 5092 miles, the last 200 or so along the gulf coast without a/c, we returned from our six week vacation. We got home with just enough time before bed to unload the vehicle, have a supper snack of baked spaghetti I put in the freezer sometime back in May, scout out 5 dead palmetto bugs and a rhinoceros beetle downstairs and a pale, blind baby gecko in the bathtub upstairs. The toilets were spotted with rust and mold, but otherwise everything seemed pretty much the same as we left it, including the laundry in the dryer, which, thanks be, had dried thoroughly.

Returning to temps in triple digits and humidity about that high made me wish I might have stayed a couple more weeks up north, but the kids were thrilled to see their toys again. My older daughter unpacked her birthday gifts, rearranged her doll tableau, and had her clothes put away before the boys were done getting in and out of the shower. Of course, they had wasted a bit of time making sure all their legos still existed. And they unpacked their bags, too. To them, this means dumping the contents of the suitcase on the floor and putting the suitcase over by the storage closet. My oldest has told me he is just going to wear the clothes on the floor until the pile is gone. I suppose I should be glad he’s not getting new clothes out.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling the way I often do after a long vacation: overwhelmed by stuff. If I can live for 6 weeks from a suitcase – and not even wear half of what I brought – why do I have so many clothes? (and the kids so many toys?) I fully intended to reduce drastically my skirt and t-shirt supply today, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t decide what I liked least. I like all my skirts. You’d think since I’d paid so little for them, I’d have an easier time parting with them. The problem with shopping at thrift stores is that, while you can buy a new outfit for $5, you’re always a little afraid that that outfit is the last cute thing you’ll ever find in your size. I need someone (Betty?) to come and tell me what to throw out. (Freedom in obedience!) It’s easier for me to sort through other people’s stuff: my mom’s, or the boys’, and pick out their week’s worth of clothes to keep. Plus, each kid only gets two drawers, so if they have more than what fits, the extra becomes hand-me-downs, but I have six drawers and a large closet, which isn’t entirely stuffed. After being inspired by the Franciscan way of life in The Right to Be Merry, I thought I’d have an easier time with cleaning stuff out.

I’ve had the same problem with the kids’ schoolwork, which was dropped in the office as we headed out the door back in May. Each kid now has a pile of artwork and papers. I’ve recycled all the worksheets and coloring pages, but I’m trying to pick out the few items that best express each kid’s personality to keep in a file folder until they grow up and decide what to do with it. I’m also trying to keep the piles even, so that someday in the future, some kid won’t question me about why so and so’s pile is bigger – did I think he was more talented? Did I love him more? But the kindergartener used reams of paper to illustrate his superhero saga and to design cruise ships a la Richard Scarry, while the seventh grader only has a few book reports that reveal something of his personality after I’ve thrown out the tests and quizzes.

Time to get rid of more paper before the mail arrives tomorrow.

A Postcard from the Road

I am still on vacation.  In my mind's eye, this trip is like one of those European tours people took for a year in the days of Henry James. Only we haven't seen many cathedrals, mostly small country churches, not including the beautiful church in Lancaster, PA, where we attended a cousin's wedding, and the majestic Marytown near our old home in Illinois where we went to Mass with my friend who is dying of cancer.  Plus we have only been gone a little over a month now.  In a week, we'll be on the road back to the bay and the oil stained gulf.

The internet at my parents' house is intermittently interrupted. I've been frustrated by slow speed and periodic disconnections while using the computer. Over the past couple of days, I've been struggling to scan and upload old family photos that we've been sorting. Irritatingly ineffective use of time. 

But being offline has provided much more time for reading and visiting, more visiting than reading.  Not being a natural sanguine, I sometimes tire from all the cheerful conversation, although I don't regret in the least that I spent time with the cousins instead of writing a blog post.  Anthony Esolen wrote a great article on cousins for Touchstone Magazine, I think, a number of years ago, that perfectly expressed the joy of these relationships that can be picked up after time and distance have worked mutations in our bodies.  So even though my hearing has suffered after spending time with the next generation of 18 cousins, its sacrifice is worth the benefit of knowing my children will have a crowd at their weddings and funerals if they maintain these relationships.  They can reminisce about trudging over dunes (see Betty Duffy's description), fishing, lake ick, farm chores at "Camp St. Isidore" (directed by Nana and Pop), and Superman ice cream at the Cool Spot.

The other trick of spending time with family, instead of virtual friends, is that you have to put up with crabbiness. Apologies to my family for my own crabby days.  Meanwhile, while I had a pity party day for petty, if not purely hormonally induced, reasons, my poor husband spent the Fourth of July getting ready for a visit from some senators.  The only fireworks over Kandahar were real rockets in the distance.  He called last night while we were watching the televised displays of the Macy's Fourth of July Celebration in New York City (with "Broadway Inspirational Singers".) The kids had already seen the fireworks displays at the county fair grounds and the show put on by their uncle and grandfather in the front yard, so we didn't load them up for a third night of pyrotechnics.  But they were full of reports to their father of the fun they have been having. Then when it was my turn to talk on the phone, I went into the laundry list of activities over the past couple of days - visit here, visit there, birthday party on the 3rd for my now 8 year old daughter and her cousin born a couple hours later, church picnic for my parents' parish priest who is moving from managing 5 small parishes to having just 2, failed nursing of an orphaned rabbit, etc.

So when I finally let my husband talk, it's no surprise he sounded a little dejected to be missing all the fun.  He's also going to miss our son's birthday next week, the last days of summer, and the start of school.  I've probably taken enough photos to fill a couple of albums with memories he won't share. So my private pity party seems even more petty.  Compound it by reading this quote in A Right to Be Merry this morning: "... the Poor Clares who live by the Gospel never worry about things, knowing that things will be around when needed. This complete dependence on our divine Provider breathes the spirit of love and simple joy which so happily ensnared my heart during the first months of my monastic life. I still exult in it."  A good reminder to exult in the joys of domestic life, also. And offer up some hopeful prayers that my husband will find some joys in the monastic like setting of the base.  Before too long we'll be sitting with him on the couch with those photos, filling in the gaps.